]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTWed, 13 May 2015 18:45:06 +0800McAfee Labs: Retrospect and predictions of the cybersecurity experthttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/212-about-us/2568-mcafee-labs-retrospect-and-predictions-of-the-cybersecurity-expert
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/212-about-us/2568-mcafee-labs-retrospect-and-predictions-of-the-cybersecurity-expertIntel® Security recently released its Threats Report and revealed its Threats Predictions for the new year. The report forecasts a 2015 threat landscape shaped by more attacks exploiting these standards, new attacks surfacing in mobile and Internet of Things (IoT), and increasingly sophisticated cyber espionage capabilities, including techniques capable of evading sandboxing detection technologies.

According to McAfee Labs, in the third quarter of 2014, more than 307 new threats were detected every minute, or more than five every second, with mobile malware samples growing by 16% during the quarter, and overall malware surging by 76 % year over year. The researchers also identified new attempts to take advantage of Internet trust models, including secure socket layer (SSL) vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed and BERserk, and the continued abuse of digital signatures to disguise malware as legitimate code.

For 2015, the company predicts that malicious parties will seek to extend their ability to avoid detection over long periods, with non-state actors increasingly adopting cyber espionage capabilities for monitoring and collecting valuable data over extended targeted attack campaigns. The security expert predict more aggressive efforts to identify application, operating system, and network vulnerabilities, and an increasing focus on the limitations of sandboxing technologies as hackers attempt to evade application- and hypervisor-based detection.

“The year 2014 will be remembered as ‘the Year of Shaken Trust,’” said Vincent Weafer, Senior Vice President, McAfee Labs, part of Intel Security. “This unprecedented series of events shook industry confidence in long-standing Internet trust models, consumer confidence in organizations’ abilities to protect their data, and organizations’ confidence in their ability to detect and deflect targeted attacks in a timely manner. Restoring trust in 2015 will require stronger industry collaboration, new standards for a new threat landscape, and new security postures that shrink time-to-detection through the superior use of threat data. Ultimately, we need to get to a security model that’s built-in by design, seamlessly integrated into every device at every layer of the compute stack.”

McAfee Labs foresees the following trends in 2015:

1. Increased use of cyber warfare and espionage tactics.Cyber espionage attacks will continue to increase in frequency as long-term players will become stealthier information gatherers, while newcomers to cyber-attack capabilities will look for ways to steal sensitive information and disrupt their adversaries.

• Established nation-state actors will work to enhance their ability to remain hidden on victim systems and networks.

• McAfee Labs predicts that more small nation states and terror groups will use cyber warfare.

2. Greater Internet of Things attack frequency, profitability, and severity. Unless security controls are built-in to their architectures from the beginning, the rush to deploy IoT devices at scale will outpace the priorities of security and privacy. This rush and the increasing value of data gathered, processed, and shared by these devices will draw the first notable IoT paradigm attacks in 2015.

• The increasing proliferation of IoT devices in environments such as health care could provide malicious parties access to personal data even more valuable than credit card data. For instance, according to the McAfee Labs report entitled Cybercrime Exposed: Cybercrime-as-a-Service, the cybercrime community currently values stolen health credentials at around $10 each, which is about 10 to 20 times the value of a stolen U.S. credit card number.

3. Privacy debates intensify. Data privacy will continue to be a hot topic as governments and businesses continue to grapple with what is fair and authorized access to inconsistently defined “personal information.”

• In 2015 we will see continued discussion and lack of clarity around what constitutes “personal information” and to what extent that information may be accessed and shared by state or private actors.

• We will see a continued evolution in scope and content of data privacy rules and regulations, we may even see laws begin to regulate the use of previously anonymous data sets.

• The European Union, countries in Latin America, as well as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and many others may enact more stringent data privacy laws and regulations.

4. Ransomware evolves into the cloud. Ransomware will evolve its methods of propagation, encryption, and the targets it seeks. More mobile devices are likely to suffer attacks.

• We predict ransomware variants that manage to evade security software installed on a system which will specifically target endpoints that subscribe to cloud-based storage solutions.

• Once the endpoint has been infected, the ransomware will attempt to exploit the logged-on user's stored credentials to also infect backed-up cloud storage data.

• We expect the technique of ransomware targeting cloud-backed-up data to be repeated in the mobile space.

• We expect a continued rise in mobile ransomware using virtual currency as the ransom payment method.

5. New mobile attack surfaces and capabilities. Mobile attacks will continue to grow rapidly as new mobile technologies expand the attack surface.

•The growing availability of malware-generation kits and malware source code for mobile devices will lower the barrier to entry for cybercriminals targeting these devices.

• Untrusted app stores will continue to be a major source of mobile malware. Traffic to these stores will be driven by “malvertising,” which has grown quickly on mobile platforms.

6. POS attacks increase and evolve with digital payments. Point of sale (POS) attacks will remain lucrative, and a significant upturn in consumer adoption of digital payment systems on mobile devices will provide new attack surfaces that cybercriminals will exploit.

• Despite current efforts by retailers to deploy more chip-and-pin cards and card readers, McAfee Labs sees continued growth in POS system breaches in 2015 based on the sheer numbers of POS devices that will need to be upgraded in North America.

• Near field communications (NFC) digital payment technology will become an entirely new attack surface to exploit, unless user education can successfully guide users in taking control of NFC features on their mobile devices.

7. Shellshock sparks Unix, Linux attacks. Non-Windows malware attacks will increase as a result of the Shellshock vulnerability.

• McAfee Labs predicts that the aftershocks of Shellshock with be felt for many years given the number of potentially vulnerable Unix or Linux devices, from routers to TVs, industrial controllers, flight systems, and critical infrastructure.

• In 2015, this will drive a significant increase in non-Windows malware as attackers look to exploit the vulnerability.

8. Growing exploitation of software flaws. The exploitation of vulnerabilities is likely to increase as new flaws are discovered in popular software products.

• McAfee Labs predicts that exploitation techniques such as stack pivoting, return- and jump-oriented programming, and a deeper understanding of 64-bit software will continue to drive the growth in the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities, as will the volume of malware that exploits those newly discovered vulnerabilities.

9. New evasion tactics for sandboxing. Escaping the sandbox will become a significant IT security battlefield.

• Vulnerabilities have been identified in the sandboxing technologies implemented with critical and popular applications. McAfee Labs predicts a growth in the number of techniques to exploit those vulnerabilities and escape application sandboxes.

]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTSun, 10 May 2015 05:17:39 +0800A closer look into Facebook’s people-based marketinghttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2555-a-closer-look-into-facebooks-people-based-marketing
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2555-a-closer-look-into-facebooks-people-based-marketingBy now, we all know that using cookies alone for ad serving and measurement is flawed, since they do not work on mobile and therefore can’t capture the whole path to purchase, besides supposedly overemphasizing last-click attribution.

Facebook’s ad serving and measurement platform, Atlas, allows brands to reach people across multiple devices with its so-called “people-based marketing”, stating: “We’ve entered a new marketing reality where marketers and advertisers are quickly shifting from a reliance on cookies to using the insights from real people and real actions to make business decisions.”

]]>daniela@mediabuzz.com.sg (DanielaL)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:31:57 +0800When the Internet got a memory…http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2554-when-the-internet-got-a-memory
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2554-when-the-internet-got-a-memoryBefore Lou Montulli developed the cookie in July 1994, the Internet had no memory. Incredible to imagine it today - especially in marketing – that whenever a person clicked on a webpage, he became an arbitrary user again and again. There was no way to bring him in connection with the action he has just executed moments before.
]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:20:16 +0800Tableau again crowned leader in business intelligence and analyticshttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2553-tableau-again-crowned-leader-in-business-intelligence-and-analytics
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2553-tableau-again-crowned-leader-in-business-intelligence-and-analyticsFor the third year in a row, Tableau has been positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms and that for good reasons. In fact, Gartner placed Tableau highest in ability to execute.

JY Pook, Vice President, Asia Pacific Sales, Tableau Software explains the company’s success, by saying: “We love helping people become data heroes, so we strive to offer products that are easier to use, accessible to everyone, and simple to integrate with existing systems.”

]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:18:50 +0800Risks that may lurk in dealing with big datahttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2552-risks-that-may-lurk-in-dealing-with-big-data-87488226
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2552-risks-that-may-lurk-in-dealing-with-big-data-87488226Despite all of the promising indications of a rosy, data-driven future, there are also critical voices that urge not to overvalue Big Data and to ensure correct handling of it.

These voices include, for example, Professor Richard Rogers, professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He presented five points of criticism regarding Big Data at the Data Days in Berlin, basically concluding that we are at present in a phase of "disappointment" after the initial hype, but with Big Data getting a clear upward trend again.

]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:17:58 +0800AccuWeather sets new record in Big Data demandhttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2551-accuweather-sets-new-record-in-big-data-demand-71592764
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2551-accuweather-sets-new-record-in-big-data-demand-71592764AccuWeather, Inc., the global leader in weather information and digital media, just announced that it receives and processes more than 9.5 billion digital requests for its accurate and personalized weather forecasts with Superior Accuracy™ every day from locations all over the world.

AccuWeather users check the weather forecast on the go multiple times per day through AccuWeather.com and the award-winning AccuWeather apps from their smartphones, tablets, televisions, watches and wearables, and through other emerging platforms such as connected car and home devices.

]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:17:12 +0800Everything is measurable – even the impact of the Oscarshttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2550-everything-is-measurable-even-the-impact-of-the-oscars-43712092
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2550-everything-is-measurable-even-the-impact-of-the-oscars-43712092The digital marketing technology company, Amobee, just shared some interesting data related to the Oscars that detail the top celebrity and brand moments across digital platforms and even provides a comprehensive view on the Most Memorable Moments, Top 5 Brand Sentiments, the Top 5 brands with the highest share of voice and social mentions during the Academy Awards.
]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 13:16:13 +0800Study reveals the drivers, priorities, and barriers behind data center investmenthttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2549-study-reveals-the-drivers-priorities-and-barriers-behind-data-center-investment
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2549-study-reveals-the-drivers-priorities-and-barriers-behind-data-center-investmentEnterprises are experiencing rapid growth in the data they can access and store, which is having a profound impact on how they invest in data centers. Therefore, in January 2014 Digital Realty commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region about the drivers, priorities, and barriers behind their data center investment. The study surveyed 267 IT decision-makers from multinational corporations (MNCs) with presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 12:38:27 +0800Apopheniahttp://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2544-apophenia
http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/211-asian-e-marketing/data-driven-marketing-week-1/2544-apopheniaThe term “Apophenia” was coined by neurologist Klaus Conrad and defined as the "unmotivated seeing of connections”, as the perception of patterns or connections where none exist.
]]>augustine@mediabuzz.com.sg (AugustineH)ROOTFri, 27 Feb 2015 10:39:31 +0800